Nate Hegyi, Freelance Radio Reporter
Seeking adventure in the rural west
By Tim Pierce
In a musty room, tinted yellow by the cheap, buzzing lights overhead, three people crowded around small desks. Two scoured the internet for news, one on an old desktop, the other hastily typing on a small laptop. They fed ideas off each other in hushed voices, not to disturb the man behind them recording lines into a microphone.
Nate Hegyi, the young man with the laptop, crossed his legs, his arms kept tight to his body. The woman to his right quietly mentioned a potential piece of interesting news, only to quickly dismiss it. Hegyi squinted, then stopped her. He had noticed a possible angle that could make for an interesting segment if just a bit more reporting was done.
“My job is to tell stories,” Hegyi said. “My other job is to tell people the day-to-day stuff that matters in their life.”
At Montana Public Radio, Hegyi assembles the stories for the evening newscast. A part-time reporter, he usually enters the building on the University of Montana campus around 3 p.m. He starts his shift by searching the Associated Press wire or Twitter for news. When he finds something, he’ll submit the idea to a group-chat. If it gets the green light, he breaks it down into a script he’ll later record for the newscast.
Local radio journalism isn’t flashy or glamorous, but “we’re covering how the sausage is made,” Hegyi, who was born in Canada and raised in Wisconsin, said. Although he reads the news three nights a week at MTPR, what he really wants is adventure, to experience new and exciting things.
“I like the feeling of being out in the field,” Hegyi said, with legs crossed, unkempt hair and a face that hadn’t seen a razor in a few days. “I like the feeling of going to weird places and doing weird things that you wouldn’t otherwise do.”
Before working at MTPR, Hegyi was the front man for an alternative-folk band called Wartime Blues.
“You write songs for other people to hold onto and derive meaning from,” Hegyi said, likening a songwriter’s job to that of a journalist.
In the song “Passionsmoke,” he tells the story of a young summer love in the West. The lyrics are specific, yet the emotions are familiar and relatable, and journalism figures even here, as he remembers trading issues of The New York Times with his girl.
After getting his bachelor’s in journalism at the University of Montana, Hegyi moved to Texas with a few members of his band to try and make it big. They didn’t. Their last album, “April, Texas,” was released in 2015. The following year saw Hegyi back in school, finishing a master’s degree in environmental science and natural resource journalism.
Although no longer playing music professionally, he doesn’t consider his transition back into journalism as a failure. His experiences as a musician — the thrill, the rush and the adventure — all bled into his career as a journalist.
He points to a recent piece about a Native bison hunt that ran on NPR’s Code Switch podcast. It examined accusations against the Nez Perce Indians over unlawful and unethical hunting near Yellowstone National Park.
“If you have a good story, and if you have a good narrative, and people can identify with your characters, then they’re going to listen to your work,” Hegyi said. “Then you share the hell out of it on Facebook and Twitter.”
Although Hegyi respects local journalism, his time as a musician shows he’s always wanted to make it big. His latest story is yet another attempt; the next step toward new and exciting things.
In the meantime, he’ll sit, cramped, in a musty room, reading the news three nights a week.
